"What I
owe to the Celtic mind is the realisation that language is music, and it is
that which I must write"(p202).

These
essays are full of other wise and wonderful observations about language. Garner
makes the distinction you would expect between Germanic words for directness –
he chooses “love”, “warm”, “go”, “hate”,“thank”, “fear” as his examples – and romance words for distance, but
also suggests that vowels represent emotion, consonants thought: “We are able
to communicate our feelings in speech without consonants, and to understand a
written statement when the vowels are omitted.” p45.

This
points to the importance of the sound of prose, and supports the truth that
ought to be universally acknowledged by writers (and was by Katherine Mansfield, who was a musician as well as an unsurpassed short story writer), that
a story is not finished until you have read it several times aloud.

Dialect, which Garner uses so expertly, he
cautions should appear sparingly, to enrich a text:

“The
art is to create the illusion of demotic rather than to reproduce it. The
quality of North-West Mercian, as of all dialects, lies not in the individual
words but in the cadence, in the music of it all” p54.

His
collection of four linked stories, The Stone Book Quartet, demonstrates
this gentle use of dialect and cadence, embedded in breathtakingly simple prose
that takes the reader directly into its world, even despite unfamiliar words
for tools and craftsmen’s techniques. Unlike his other fiction (such as the
books mentioned above), there is no fantasy here beyond the imagination of the
characters. The world of these stories, shown in each case from a child’s
perspective, is a solid, earthy one, peopled with stonecutters, smiths,
scythers, men who with their hands turn stone and metal into steeples and
weathercocks, and can uncover magic in materials.

As in folk tales (which Garner also handles expertly), there is
scant description of actual feelings or character’s inner states. Rather,
against the backdrop of plain prose, structured into short, direct sentences,
Garner is able to make us understand profound emotion through the outward
expressions of the characters, and by allowing image and metaphor to soar
suddenly up and out of the material world.

It is
hard to give an example of this plain prose and its effect, as the latter is
partly cumulative, and means that when emotion does come, it sweeps the reader
up in it mercilessly. But to give a feel, here is a snippet, in which a young
boy, Joseph, realises that he wants to be a smith, to work iron rather than
stone as his grandfather does:

“Joseph
walked down the village towards the school and Saint Philip’s, over the station
bridge. Everything he saw was clear. He knew something he didn’t know. It was
the bell. It was the clock. It was the spires!

Grandfather
had worked the chapel. But he had not given it the time. He helped on the
school but he couldn’t ring them in. He had topped Saint Philip’s steeple, but
it wasn’t the top. The top was a golden vane, a weather cock. Cock, clock, bell
and at the chapel a spike to draw lightning. Wind, time, voice, fire – they
were all the smith!” (p52).

In an
earlier story in the book, we have seen a girl being lifted by her father to
sit on this golden weather vane, surveying the landscape below. The boy Joseph
climbs right inside the top of the steeple, amongst roosting pigeons, and finds
his grandfather’s mark carved in the stone. These are startling, unforgettable
images, carved in the simplest prose, and like the working of stone and metal
by his characters, Garner seems to be making magic when he does this.

As Garner
says in The Voice that Thunders, “The
job of a storyteller is to speak the truth; but what we feel most deeply cannot
be spoken in words, at this level only images connect. And so story becomes
symbol; and symbol is myth” (p27). Garner manages to produce something mythic
in his writing, and in the case of The
Stone Book Quartet without any recourse to fantasy. I’d recommend it to
anyone looking to be transported by short fiction, and to writers interested in
language as a lesson in the power of restraint. I will be re-reading these
stories many times trying to work out how Garner does it.

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About Me

I am a writer, mainly of short stories, and those often with a folkloric bent. Some of these I write as part of my PhD in Creative Writing, at the University of Chichester. I am associate editor at The Word Factory, where I co-run a short story club, and I also run my own critique group for short story writers in London. Before all of that, I studied Philosophy for a long time, with an emphasis on philosophy of mind and rationality. I live in London and have a 'real' job as well as writing, but happily I reside by a little patch of woods which is all I need to keep me sane.